A hardboiled private eye genre film that comes with
the
troubling
taboo subject matter of kiddie porn. It is directed
with strength and
conviction
by the talented Britisher Chris Menges (A World
Apart/Second Best),
who
does not flinch in covering all the slime. But the
film goes Hollywood
in its conventional violent ending, as it uses the
typical gumshoe
action
response to a very real societal problem. This
intelligent thriller,
however,
is not ruined by that and should be applauded for its
sound treatment
of
the pedophile theme it raises and its refusal to
soft-pedal it.

The famous French actor with the perpetual sad look
on his
kisser,
Daniel Auteuil, is in his first English-language role
(he has a lot of
trouble with the language, which does hinder his
performance). He plays
an ex-Paris cop Xavier Lombard, who left under cloudy
circumstances
after
a murder investigation over a drug dealer. Trying to
get by and forget
his troubles in Paris he's now living alone in a
modest London Soho
flat
with his goldfish and in his spare time plays in an
amateur soccer
league.
Xavier works as a private eye, handling mostly
adultery cases.

Xavier's surprised to find that his former Parisian
colleague, Carlos
(Hinds), is living in London the last three years and
is now working
for
his rich manufacturer father in-law from Hampstead.
Carlos has talked
the
family into hiring him to find their wayward son,
Leon, a heroin addict
and a dilettante photographer who has been missing
ever since he
borrowed
a thousand pounds about a month ago from his sister.

Mr. and Mrs. Spitz (Cyril Shaps & Billie
Whitlaw) give
him a
generous retainer and implore him to find their son
while Deborah
(Kinski),
Carlos's wife, takes a hostile stance against both her
brother and the
shamus. She says Leon probably used the money for
drugs.

Checking out Leon's flat the private eye obtains the
address of Emily
(Cartlidge), Leon's girlfriend. When he visits her, he
finds a Third
World
child who is so traumatized he can't speak. The
victimized child was
brought
to stay with Emily by Leon. The kid only mentions that
the Austrian did
this to him. Emily also gives him a kiddie porno
videotape that Leon
gave
her, before he disappeared.

Lombard works hard to convince his loyal hooker
friend
Nathalie (Denicourt),
someone he knew from Paris, to use her pimp contacts
to get him a child
sex date from the Austrian. From thereon, it's Lombard
doing a Clint
Eastwood
thing against the sleazy operators of this
international
kidnapping-porn
ring. He will track them down in the hotel they use to
force these kids
into having sex with paying customers, and in one shot
worth more than
a thousand words--a kid victim pisses on the corpse of
one of his
abusers.
Lombard's implausible one man crusade will take him as
faraway as
Mexico,
as this shady private eye stubbornly feels he must do
the right thing
and
eradicate this scum of the earth child sex syndicate.
The surprise
comes
at the end, as to who is heading the porn ring. Though
it's not much of
a surprise, as the ending is a familiar one for this
genre.